Just how prevalent are Google’s knowledge graphs in their Google search results?  According to Google, it is a lot that many might have suspected.  They currently have over one billion knowledge graph entities… yes, one billion.

During Google’s I/O keynote on Thursday, Aparna Chennapragada, Director of Product Management from Google Now took the stage to talk about Google Now’s ability to find and serve knowledge graph results for users.  She revealed that Google has over 1 billion knowledge graph entities that they are serving to Google searchers today.

Of course, if you consider that from the search results point of view, this means there are many billion keywords and keyword phrases that currently display a knowledge graph, since many similar searches will serve the same knowledge graph.  For example, searching for “Canucks”, “Vancouver Canucks”, “NHL Canucks”, “Vancouver hockey” and so on will all display the same knowledge graph results.

Chennapragada said:

This is where Google’s knowledge graph comes in pretty handy.  So the knowledge graph is Google’s understanding of the world and all the things in it.  In fact, we have over one billion entities.  Things like baseball teams, gas stations, tv shows, cocktail recipes, the works.  So this can power a lot of useful answers for you.

And with over one billion, it means that these types of knowledge graphs are algorithmically created, despite some people’s insistence that every knowledge graph is individually hand-created by Google.

Google is usually pretty secretive about just how many search results spawn things such as knowledge graphs and answers boxes.  The fact they revealed just how many knowledge graphs they have available to serve users is pretty significant.

Here is the video of the I/O keynote timestamped to that part of the presentation.